Groundbreaking for $9.3M Town Hall July 9 in Dracut (VIDEO)

DRACUT -- A groundbreaking ceremony marking the official start of work on the new $9.3 million Dracut Town Hall office complex will be Tuesday, July 9 at 6 p.m., Town Clerk Kathy Graham announced.

The public is invited.

As voted by Town Meeting on June 3, $9.3 million will be expended, under the direction of the Permanent Building Committee and Board of Selectmen, on the new office complex to be erected immediately behind the Town Hall building.

Plans call for the old Town Hall to continue its operations as usual while the new offices are being constructed.

Artist renderings of the new Dracut Town Hall complex will be on display at the town's formal groundbreaking ceremony for the new office complex on July 9 at 6 p.m. outside Town Hall at 62 Arlington St. Courtesy Johnson Roberts Associates

Upon completion of the project, Town Hall employees will move into their new offices and the old building will be razed, Graham said.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, renderings of the new building and floor plans will be on display, courtesy of the project's architects, Johnson Roberts Associates.

An aerial view of the project, supplied by Johnson Roberts Associates and already viewable in a poster-size display at Town Hall, includes a depiction of what the area will look like after Champlain Street is permanently sealed off to traffic between Town Hall and the Parker Memorial Library.

Town Meeting also approved closing down a 352-foot stretch of Champlain Street, from Arlington Street to Lafayette Street, as part of the project designers' vision to make the Dracut town offices and library complex contiguous and more safely accessible.

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Dracut's Town Hall was built in the late 1800s. A new Town Hall project has been in the works for more than a decade.

A 1999 study determined the need for a new town hall, but in 2001 voters rejected a measure that would have appropriated $5.8 million to buy a 24,000-square-foot office building on Loon Hill Road that would have housed all town offices, as well as the Sewer Department. Opponents said the price-tag was too high, and the measure failed by 35 votes -- 165 to 130.

By September 2003, because neither the Town Hall nor the Town Hall annex on Spring Street was accessible to the handicapped, the town was targeted with a lawsuit brought by Donahue Road resident and paraplegic Scott Frotton and Access with Success Inc., a nonprofit corporation founded by Frotton, who noted the buildings did not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.

In October 2005, then-Selectmen Chairman James O'Loughlin recommended that rather than "throw good money after bad" in fixing mounting problems with the older buildings, in addition to making them ADA-compliant, the next logical step would be to build a new town hall.

Seventeen months after the November 2011 Town Meeting approved spending $8 million on the design and building of the new Town Hall, the construction bids were opened on May 29, coming in at $1.3 million over what was budgeted for. The lowest of the six bids, submitted by CTA Construction of Waltham, was $7.2 million, Town Manager Dennis Piendak reported.

Since Piendak had anticipated construction costs would come in higher, he already had a warrant article prepared to ask the June 2013 Town Meeting to appropriate the extra funds. Article 16, asking Town Meeting to appropriate an added $1.3 million for the Town Hall project, passed by a majority vote.

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